JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
The media outlets seem to be all-in too. But Sergeant Scribbles (as I understand we're now supposed to call Vance) seems to be risking a pretty fierce firestorm if he's going after a decorated high-ranking combat commander from the comparative safety of his air-conditioned typing job.
True, but a sizeable proportion of the US electorate now has the idea that Walz is guilty of stolen valour whilst Vance is a seasoned, hardened warrior with decades of in-theatre experience behind enemy lines.
The campaign has pivoted to swift-boating to distract from the fact that it was Vance who embellished his record.
I've never served in uniform. But I've spent a considerable portion of my career contracting for the military. This has required me to be in harm's way a couple times, to the extent of wearing body armor and "safety not guaranteed," etc. I've been within earshot of combat—distant booms—but I would never be so pretentious and disrespectful as to say I've served in a combat zone because it's simply not the truth. My friend and fellow aerospace engineering student in college died at the battle of Khafji, earning a posthumous Silver Star. My brother in law retires from the Navy this year after 20 years of service that included leading boarding teams for pirate interdiction. These are the people I consider to have served in combat. I just drank bad coffee and hoped the stuff I was responsible for worked as planned.
What I learned from that experience, though, is that bragging up one's combat service record and combat experience to another service member is really kinda something only the toy soldiers do. From what I've seen and heard, if you've actually been in real combat, the whole phallus-measuring thing seems to fall by the wayside because (1) someone else within earshot will always have seen more or worse combat than either of you, and (2) it's a qualitative proposition, not a quantitative measure. If you've actually been in combat, you are once and forever different and you don't need to talk about it. I think this is probably why Vance is getting dragged so hard by veterans. Those of you who have served in combat are welcome to correct me.
Donald Trump never lied about or embellished his nonexistent military record. He pulled strings to stay out of Vietnam. Nobody actually believes he had "bone spurs," but that's different than saying he was a combat soldier when he wasn't.
However, we can compile a very lengthy list of all the other things Trump has bragged about that are either untrue or suspect, and which Trump has labored mightily to hide. Is he really a billionaire? Did he really get super high marks in college?
Similarly, no one believes that J.D. Vance rose from rags to riches. Enough people have fact-checked Hillbilly Elegy to question that narrative.
Now the tiff seems to be that Walz wasn't really a football coach; he was only an assistant coach. My high school track team had a head coach and three assistant coaches. They were all "coach," and disrespecting their authority, dedication, and skill would swiftly get you kicked off the team. The GOP seems insanely desperate to discredit Walz' résumé as a distraction from the glaring holes in their own candidates' records.
